Word: hipped
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...much independent hip-hop, from Rawkus to Rhymesayers, suffers from that tidy precision—hanging onto skeletons of forms long after the first experiments made them stick...
...alive they border on stream-of-consciousness. You’re bombarded on all sides by sounds from all times. It doesn’t hurt that Doom has the flow to match, a drunken rambling full of non-sequiturs and bizarre metaphors as jubilantly lyrical as anything from hip-hop’s early Nineties golden age. Sampladelic psychedelia at its best...
Lately everyone’s talking about Kanye West, the man who helped Jay-Z start a new classicist vision of hip-hop in The Blueprint. Initially that record seemed like a triumph of the same underground “backpacker” values in mainstream culture—its straightforward beats and soul samples heralded Jigga’s return to basics and the inner reflection of his own early classic Reasonable Doubt...
...same naively uplifting ends. (Charmingly ironic is the vocoder-led house number that bursts out of “The New Workout Plan”—work that drum machine, Kanye.) In contrast to the “faded photograph” echo in much of hip-hop’s sampled melodies, Kanye is relentlessly optimistic even when he’s down...
This sort of outward development may be at odds with hip-hop’s basis in repetition and samples, pitting raw craft against the simple irreverence of stealing music. It’s no more risky than Madlib’s swarm of loops or anything the genre has already done, but it is curiously ambitious...